And After
by tapple
Summary: Naruto is a dykey not-so-sweet sixteen, and Sasuke is an annoying, beautiful stereotype, and they are so totally not falling in love. Real World AU. Genderswitch. Narusasu, past Kakasasu.
1. Chapter 1

**And After**

**Notes: **This fic touches on quite a few social justice issues, many of them pretty overtly, on account of it being an AU taking place in our world. I have of course done my best to handle them sensitively and with care, but several offensive words/opinions are expressed by the characters, sometimes because they are clueless, sometimes because they are nasty. Potentially triggering "everyday" slurs and allusions are made throughout the fic (i.e. characters briefly discussing sexual violence, characters engaging in "playful" slut shaming, pejorative use of words like "crazy" and "insane", etc). I'm giving a blanket warning for this here, rather than specific ones for each chapter, but if there's a particular topic/word you'd like to be notified about, please let me know.

The fic also deals, intermittently but continuously, with severe bullying, an eating disorder, difficult home lives and grief at the loss of a loved one. Chapter-specific content will be warned for as necessary.

This is a gender!switch, in which Naruto and Sasuke were born female, and the primary pairing is Naruto/Sasuke/Naruto. There's also a slew of secondary pairings, particularly past Kakashi/Sasuke. In the fic, Kakashi was never their teacher, and the age difference is far smaller. However, the fic contains teenage sex, which depending on where you live may be considered underage although the characters are above the age of consent in their country (all the actual sex scenes are between sixteen year olds or older, but there are allusions to sex between fifteen year olds and to sexual behaviour, such as kissing and experiencing desire, involving younger teens).

The fic takes place in a fictionalised but largely realistic Sweden. School is essentially just background setting, but for the record the depiction of it is factually accurate, with the exception of the grading system. For reader convenience, I've taken the liberty of converting the Swedish system to what I understand to be the most widely internationally recognised one, A-D. The currency used is the Swedish kronor/crowns; the exchange rate is currently at about 10SEK/1 Euro, 8SEK/$1, 12SEK/£1.

Also, please note that the characterisation is based on the original anime series (eps 1 through 135), as I'm not at all up to date with Shippuden.

That said, enjoy XD

**Chapter One**

Whoever said sixteen is sweet? Was a fucking liar.

Sitting on the school steps in the dusty late-summer sunlight, Naruto feels damp and dumb with heat, and very far from sweet. It's going on three weeks since her birthday, too, so the sweetness should have had time to settle in, if it were going to. Instead everything is gritty and grimy with frustrated heat, this last week of August when the thermometers jump towards thirty degrees.

She leans forward over her knees, fingers rubbing over the flaking scabs and catching in the stubble. She's been in shorts since the semester started and so far the lack of shaving has only earned her eight "ape" and twelve "gross" – you can tell it's a posh school, that she's clawed her way up to one of the higher levels of high school hell.

"Hi," an uncertain voice says above her. "Naruto, right?"

Naruto tilts her head to the side, squinting, and doesn't point out that Sakura knows perfectly well who she is. "Yeah, hi. You wanna…?"

"Right. Thanks." Smoothing her skirt, Sakura gingerly sits down beside her, arranging an armful of folders in her lap. She's so tasteful, so _appropriate_, and Naruto's hands itch for her the way her feet ache for the new snow every winter. "So, Iruka asked me to help manage his anti-ism thing, and I see you signed up on the volunteer list?"

"Yeah, I did."

"Right. Great. Well, we've got people to cover the anti-racism, but far fewer are interested in working with feminism, so I thought maybe you…?"

"Sure," Naruto says with a grin just shy of shit-eating. "I'm in. What are we doing? Like, mass meetings? Carnivals? Kick-Arse classes? Self defence, I mean, but really, you know, the best defence is a good offence!"

Sakura sighs and pushes hair out of her face before speaking, the movement revealing dark half-moons under her arms, which is oddly sexy: a flash of body in the prim dress. A year ago Naruto would have been crushing on her, would have been crushing so hard on _normal_ and _pretty_ and _kind_.

Then _normal_ cut up her face in a school toilet while _pretty_ giggled and _kind_ looked the other way.

Naruto squints until all she can see is the grainy, sun-drenched pink of Sakura's failed dye-job.

"I believe Iruka was thinking more along the lines of arranging seminars and helping him administrate the whole thing, really. Also, um. Perhaps you could try to be a bit more–" Sakura cuts herself off, waving and calling, "Sasuke! Over here!"

For such a tiny person, Sasuke has a blissfully large shadow; soaked in it Naruto can sit back, watching the school's requisite ice princess lean unmelted against the railing.

_You're such a stereotype_, she told Sasuke once, outside the headmistress' office during her fourth lunch break at Sannin Academy.

_I prefer archetype_, Sasuke said, then took her raised eyebrow and perfect poise and left.

She watches Sasuke's grating beauty, the waifish shoulders and enormous eyes and the breasts which are really about the same size as Naruto's own but look radically bigger on Sasuke, and doesn't hear the words in the mumble of voices until suddenly the conversation clicks and she has to pipe up: "_You're_ a feminist?"

Even Sakura has been careful not to use that kind of direct language, preferring to say she's working with a wide range of anti-discrimination issues including but not limited to sexism.

"You're surprised that I'm opposed to being on the wrong end of institutionalised discrimination?" Sasuke asks, showing impressive facial dexterity by once again raising a single eyebrow. "I guess some people really are as dumb as they look."

"Well," Naruto says, more curious than pissed. "You certainly don't look like a feminist."

"Impressive stereotyping you've got there. Just because I, unlike your cavewoman self, have the technical skills to master a razor."

Naruto makes a sound of baffled outrage and something that could have been laughter, once, back when the world felt safer. "You're one to talk! That's so typical, that whole bullshit load of only white pretty middle class straight chicks deserve equality crap!"

Resting her elbows on top of the railing, Sasuke looks at her with amused contempt and lights a cigarette. Her cut-glass accent grates on Naruto's ears like fucking glass splinters when she says, "Unlike me, _you_ are white middle class. Admittedly, the dykeness comes through loud and clear."

"I'm _bisexual_," Naruto snaps. Jeez, people, get off your upper-class arses and look it up.

Sasuke's eyes are marginally colder, half-lidded, or maybe she's just squinting, sun-blind. "Which is basically gay-speak for slut, right?"

"Yeah, no. Actually it's gay-speak for I'm not a stupid bitch too narrow-minded to like people for who they are instead of for their bits."

"Do watch the sexist insults there, Ms Feminazi."

"Right," Sakura interrupts. "This isn't constructive." Not looking up at Sasuke, she uncurls enough to rearrange her files, pressing them to her chest as she stands. "Look, I'll get back to you when I've got everything planned out, but – I can count on you both, okay?"

"Of course," says Naruto, smiling at her until the whisker scars pull, because Sakura _is_ pretty and kind.

"I suppose," says Sasuke. She drops the cigarette butt and lights a new one, adding, "Someone has to make up for all the bad press you're sure to garner."

"Shut up, jerkarse," Naruto snaps. It's just the two of them now, but strangely she feels calmer, heavy with warmth.

"Whatever."

"Great comeback." She eases back down again, too heat-struck to fume. "Also, smoking kills, you know."

"Yeah, well." The cigarette breaks the line of her smile, makes it somehow the most Sasuke-ish expression Naruto has yet seen.

As Sasuke keeps smoking and the sun keeps burning, Naruto lies back, resting the back of her head against her balled-up shirt and studying the area covered by Sasuke's shadow; her own hand, an empty bottle, Sasuke's feet. Clearly Sasuke is ice princess enough to be immune to tanning, because her skin is anaemia pale in the sandals. Naruto freckles in one day, burns in two, bakes in three, to the point where the freckles have become bright spots on her arms and face.

Sasuke shifts, flicking the cigarette butt away, and Naruto discovers her feet aren't virgin white after all. There are marks beneath the heel slips of her sandals and between her big and index toe, nasty dark little circles.

Eventually Sasuke orders, "Scoot over."

If Naruto could raise an eyebrow without its twin going along for the ride and her entire forehead scrunching up, now is when she'd do it, but she shuffles to the side to leave sitting room. Oddly, Sasuke, who stands and walks with easy adult poise, sits like a little girl who can't quite decide whether she'd like to be a ballerina or a contortionist, chin on her knees, her toes curling around the edge of the step.

"Have you ever thought about working as a circus princess?"

Sasuke gives her a level stare half obscured by her fringe. "I'd ask if you'd considered working as a clown, except that might give the impression I care."

Naruto has little idea what new madness her mouth would have released in response to that, but is distracted by the advent of Gaara, who nods in passing when she waves – nods at both of them, two slow but sharp individual movements, and Sasuke _nods back_.

"You know Gaara?" she demands, turning on Sasuke with newfound energy.

Sasuke shrugs, her tiny shoulder rising white and emaciated, not unlike a shark fin. "He was in our class before he got held back."

"You don't acknowledge half the people who are in our class now. And actually, Gaara's even worse, I've seen him talk to like two people."

"He nodded at you, didn't he? And much as I regret it, I'm actually talking to you. Clearly our standards aren't that high."

"Look, I know _I'm_ irresistible, it doesn't explain why you two anti-social jerks would be all cosy with each other."

Sweat rolls down Naruto's face in the silence while Sasuke doesn't answer and then keeps not answering until eventually, carefully, she remarks, "It'd take some real irresistibility to wave at Gaara and keep the hand. Irresistibility being one of the many qualities you lack."

"Was that a question? Are you actually showing interest in something that's not about you? Wow. All right, fine, Gaara and I obviously found each other via freakdar."

Sasuke looks annoyed to the point of twitching, but she doesn't leave. Why doesn't she leave? She says, "What?"

"Freakdar! Like gaydar, except for finding fellow freaks instead of gays."

"Most people wouldn't need social radar to identify you two as freaks." Her lips curl rather nastily, but it's still marginally more of a smile than a sneer.

Is this a candid camera style try-out for _She's All That_, or are they sort of bonding? Naruto would ask, but Sasuke's mouth is terribly fascinating. It's a _Birth of Venus_ mouth, not quite smiling, so fucking beautiful.

"Gaara," she says instead, tongue speeding nervously to keep ahead of thought. "What's up with that?"

Because Sasuke will know. Kiba doesn't, and Sakura doesn't, maybe even Gaara doesn't, but Sasuke must. She might be tight-lipped or she might lie, but she will know.

"According to popular opinion, only that he's a kitten-tormenting, drug-crazed matricidal rapist."

Naruto blinks. Sasuke doesn't. With heavy unblinking lids she keeps staring at Naruto like a creepy snake.

"A drug-crazed what rapist?"

"Matricidal. Oh god, you imbecile. Mother-murdering?"

"Huh."

"To be fair, the kitten part is true," Sasuke adds, rising. It's a gradual process, a slow, stretchy straightening of the queer lines of her circus princess pose.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Class."

"Oh. Right. Wait up!" Naruto stumbles upright and jogs after her. Sasuke's pace doesn't change, and Naruto ambles along beside her towards the classroom. Iruka said last week that they needn't bring books this time, they were just going to talk, which is probably why the truancy ratio, although bolstered by late Tuesday lassitude, hasn't reached epic levels.

She remembers what Headmistress Tsunade said, during their first terrifying interview on school grounds: At Sannin Academy we are concerned with results.

Dad was quick to remind her that while the school might not much care whether she cut class as long as she aced the work, he certainly did. Besides, it's not as though Naruto would manage any acing if she cut.

What's odd is, Sasuke likely could, whether because she's rich enough or smart enough – a quick glance shows she's wearing her classroom face, exuding bored superiority from every pore, and no teacher has ever called her on the smugness – but her attendance record is perfect.

Well, Sasuke is odd altogether; Naruto would've assumed she sticks around for the attention of various minions and admirers, except she obviously doesn't want it.

And then there's today's exciting mystery, the Gaara Nodding Incident.

While tortured kittens would certainly explain Kiba's aversion to Gaara, Kiba's also soft-faced around that shy, pretty Muslim girl who probably would not appreciate Gaara's derogatory remarks on religion…

"All right, settle down," Iruka intones, and Naruto hurries after Sasuke towards their table. In an effort to 'avoid cliques and promote an open and friendly social environment' Iruka, who has clearly consumed a few too many pedagogical texts, forces them to group alphabetically.

Sasuke, who come to think of it probably knows Naruto's name thanks only to this arrangement, is already seated, pen and notebook in front of her, one leg slung primly over the other, and Naruto nods at Ino and takes the last free chair.

"Okay," Iruka says, shutting the door. "Capital punishment – right or wrong? Everyone in favour of it, hands up. This means if you keep your hand down, you're against it, guys. There's no middle ground today. All right, show of hands."

Naruto is jolted awake from her half-doze by Sasuke calmly raising a hand, stares, and for a moment isn't sure why, because it's not as though it's unexpected for Sasuke to have right wing nut opinions. But, she realises, she'd have never expected her to be so brazen about it, would've thought her far too politically correct for this bland frankness.

"You can take down your hands," Iruka says. "Now we get to the interesting part: why? Sasuke?"

There's no hesitation, her voice soft and clear and cold as she says, "I think some things should be unforgivable."

"All right. Naruto, you look surprised, and I saw you didn't raise your hand. Why?"

"Er, because killing people is obviously wrong?"

Iruka glances at Sasuke, who says, still so calm, "And locking them up isn't?"

"Oh please," Naruto interjects, "you of all people are not arguing against the inhumanity of prison."

"Well, no. I'm not." That smile-sneer hybrid is back, although Mona Lisa enigmatic in its subtlety.

"Looks like we're going to have an interesting lesson today," Iruka interrupts. "Everyone discuss within their groups, I'll be circulating."

Naruto looks across the table at Sasuke, energy like a buzz trying to break out through her skin.

"Did you have an opinion, Ino?" Sasuke asks, and Naruto feels abruptly doused in cold water.

It's true Ino didn't get much say last week, though.

Ino shrugs, shifting uncomfortably to her flip hair over her shoulder. "Not really, I guess. I mean, I'm not sure."

"How unusual," Sasuke says dryly. "Moving on. I take it the extent of your argument is 'it's wrong'?"

"Well," Naruto says. "It is wrong, so yeah."

"That's not a rational argument."

"If you actually were rational, you wouldn't need any arguments to understand why it's wrong to kill people."

"Really?" Sasuke says, relaxing against the backrest of her chair. "Because rationally speaking, certain offenders should be executed, not as punishment, necessarily, but simply to prevent them from committing further crimes."

"There are other ways of doing that," Naruto insists. "Besides, killing criminals wouldn't prevent more crimes being committed, because hello, killing someone is still murder even if you call it execution." She's intensely aware of her own pulse, irrationally sharp and agitated and sweet, and of Sasuke fiddling with the topmost button of her shirt. This is irrelevant, but slowly it dawns on her that Sasuke has the most astonishingly beautiful hands, child-sized but woman-shaped, skilled and pretty and immaculate like in an old painting, and Naruto has the most astonishingly embarrassing thing for hands.

"Killing a criminal is not the same as killing an innocent," Sasuke says, managing to be unbelievably condescending while keeping her face and voice neutral, ignoring that Ino has picked up her mobile and now starts texting. "In order to be recognised by society as a person, and access the rights that come with that, one must accept certain responsibilities, certain rules. If you break them, you've forfeited your rights. In other words, by killing other people, you've stripped yourself of your human rights, and as such killing you isn't murder."

"That's insane," Naruto objects.

"On the contrary," Sasuke says smoothly. "If by sane you mean rational then actually it's the opposite of insane."

Naruto jumps at the abrupt yell from across the room, "Better death than fat camp!"

Ino looks up from her texting. "Seems Shino got to him again, huh."

Everything looks amiable over at Chouji's table, though, Iruka now presiding over the mumble of jeers and laughter, so Naruto – well, she'd have liked to think of it as turning back towards Sasuke, but truthfully she never really turned away. She says, "Look, killing someone is wrong, obviously, but doing it doesn't mean you stop being a human."

"I never said it did. I simply said you can't have rights without responsibilities. I think the basic difference is that you insist on a fundamental equal worth which I don't accept." She shrugs, one-shouldered, her hand falling from the button. "For example, I think that my not torturing children makes me better than anyone who does. And if you agree that someone can be a better person than someone else, then you don't really believe in equal worth, do you?"

"Someone being a better person doesn't mean they get to kill other people! Doing that would make them not better people."

The corner of Sasuke's mouth curls, in what would be a grin on Kiba but a smirk on Gaara. On Sasuke, Naruto isn't sure what it is. "So, plainly itching to murder me, does that make you a bad person?"

"Itching to slap some sense into you, maybe, you psycho arsehole." Her voice comes out odd, in a tone she couldn't identify if asked. The tension shifted so abruptly with the quirk of Sasuke's lips.

"But that's what I said. People aren't the same, they shouldn't be treated the same. Even if she'd said the same thing, you'd never hit Sakura."

"I," Naruto says. "That doesn't mean I think you should _die_."

"Okay, class," Iruka booms, talking over anything Sasuke might have said in reply. Naruto blanks the rest of his speech, looking across the room at Sakura, polite and attentive, then back to Sasuke, who has really creepy fascist leanings and is beyond wrong about glorified murder, but utterly right about Naruto.

Sakura is… well, she's Sakura, and Naruto has, or thinks she has, a pretty good idea of what to expect. If Sakura did sprout crazy shit, that'd be disappointing and it'd suck, but it wouldn't change anything.

Sasuke's something else entirely.

xxxxx

The wind has finally picked up a little, although it's currently shuffling the heat around more than dispelling it. Standing one-footed on the porch, scratching at her knee with her toes, Naruto tugs a tank top down over her head and shakes out her hair. It's longer now, not enough for a ponytail but about right for two rubber-banded tufts to keep it out of her face, dripping residual shower water down her neck.

Not unusually, Iruka kept them late, and she barely had time to nod to Kiba before sprinting towards the bus. It was a good run, despite the weather, the kind when the ground stops being central and becomes only something with which to implement the running. Too bad the following hour locked in the bus, with the air so dry it burned her lungs, was decidedly less pleasant. She got stuck beside Mrs Finn again, a nice lady to talk to but not to be crushed up against, especially now that stealing half of someone's seat also means sweating all over them.

But today was good.

She stretches forward contentedly, catching her toes.

Hell, today wasn't good, today was, like, official Sasuke day. Which is really something quite different from good.

Lured by the promises of the fridge, she pads back inside just in time to hear the front door opening. It still sounds wrong; she's got used to the looks of the new house, but her ears are more conservative than her eyes, insisting that the old sounds of her childhood home are what should be heard.

"Hello," Dad calls out. "Anybody home?"

"Right here. Juice?" Not bothering to wait for a yes, she fills two glasses and downs them both.

"Hey now," Dad protests, slouching down on a chair. "I thought one of those was mine."

"It was, before I got really thirsty. Here you go." She jumps to sit on the counter, feet dangling from the unfashionable height of it. "You're home earlyish?"

"Yeah, well, it's not that much to do yet, I figured I might as well enjoy being my own man and get out of the heat."

On a bad AC day the garage is actually even hotter than the bus, but it's not the relative chill of inside that makes something cold cramp in her stomach.

"Are we, I mean, are we okay?"

Not all car owners stay faithful to their mechanic when he suddenly moves towns, no matter how good he is. Things got pretty messy and abrupt, towards the end of last semester, much of which she spent hospitalised, and then when she was released she discovered Dad had reconciled with her previously unknown Gran Tsunade to get Naruto transferred into a school he trusted, outside of the old district, and Mum had got a new job and applied to a new university, and they were looking for a new house and a new garage.

"We're fine, honey. It isn't accident season yet, but just wait for the autumn storms and I'll have more work than I ever wanted, don't you worry."

"Good. So. Can I have a puppy?"

He smothers a grin, laugh lines wrinkling light against his tan. "No."

"Aww, come on. Akamaru's sister just had her litter, they're the cutest things ever!" Warm and cuddly, happy to be with you, and she's not bullied here so surely it's not just a pathetic defence mechanism to want one?

"You've already got Kiba, we don't need two dogs in the house."

Well actually, Naruto doesn't say, at present there are no dogs at all in the house, seeing as Kiba has been persona non grata since the somewhat less than sober Saturday evening he and Naruto high-jacked a Chevy Dad had mostly fixed.

While the bruises have faded, they're still working off the cost of repairing the resultant buckles.

"So, how was school?"

"Okay, I guess." She shifts, made uncomfortable by the sudden tension straightening his shoulders. He won't ask again, can't, but she has to give him more. It's just the happiness is so jittery, it's awkward to make it into words. "We had Philosophy, and, well, Iruka obviously only teaches because there's no counsellor job for him. I mean, he's not a bad teacher, but all the PC babble, you know? And now he's throwing this anti-ism thing and it's going to be nothing but talk, talk, talk."

"I think it's nice he's promoting tolerance," Dad tries in a light tone. There's a continuation to that, from overheard conversations, and it goes: after all shouldn't you be grateful, he's being pressured to take care of your issues…

"I don't want to be bloody tolerated!" But she does know that Dad has never said that, would never say that; bites back a yelp as her heel impacts with the counter, turns it into something like a smile. "Look, I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate not being beaten up, but…"

"I know, honey." His large hand fits over her own where it's rubbing at the back of her neck, her knuckles snuggling into the calluses. "That's not how I meant it. I don't think that's how Iruka means it either."

She doesn't have to say anything before the door whines in the wrong way again, admitting Mum who's glowing with post-seminar happy agitation. There are the customary hugs, and dinner-making and dinner-eating, and Mum talks about all the interesting aspects of the Master Program, showing the truly terrifying scholarly zest that has apparently forced a confession of classmateship from a patient. When eventually she asks did anything interesting happen today sweetie, Naruto is flabbergasted and grateful to choke on an over-large mouthful of chilli, because _interesting_ would have to mean the complicated expression on Sasuke Uchiha's very pretty, very versatile mouth when she said the kitten part is true, and there aren't any words to translate Sasuke's presence to people who haven't experienced her, or not any words that Naruto has.

She might say something along the lines of, Imagine taking a bunch of stereotypes and mixing them all together so that when you think you've got it, that you've got her, then she does something and everything changes and suddenly nothing makes sense anymore.

Mum was right, probably, when she said stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason, the reason being that there's something tantalising about the concept, and after awhile also something soothing and familiar to rest in, something comfortable and safe to make it easy to throw yourself recklessly into loving it. There's nothing wrong with that, she said, the only problem is, after a while it becomes predictable and then it goes from safe to boring.

That's when the stereotype analogy stops making sense, unfortunately, because Sasuke… isn't boring, but rather cheats the whole idea by being utterly unpredictable yet retaining the fascination, which – well, which is actually exactly the sort of unfair play one would expect from a pseudo-fascist bitch queen.

xxxxx

Wednesday is painfully dull, dusty and hot and anticipatory. Kiba is mending things with Shino, who is far too creepy for Naruto to join in the argument regarding whether Akamaru trashing a terrarium was premeditated murder or self-defence. Letting the discussion wind down to an uneasy compromise about justifiable manslaughter on its own, she sets out to corner Gaara to… not talk about kittens.

She'd have assumed Sasuke was lying, except Sasuke is just about the only person who'd have no qualms greeting a known torturer of baby animals. Possibly it's a shared interest.

She catches him outside the canteen, his hair a stoplight-red shock against the beige walls.

"Why are you here?" he asks. It's not the belligerent demand it was the first time they met, when she stumbled over him on the way home from the shops and insisted on carrying some of his far too many bags for him, but the words are as flat and cold as his expression.

Naruto shrugs, beams at the progress of Gaara warming up towards human temperature and plops down next to him. If he didn't hit her the first time, he won't do it now. "I need a reason to talk to you?"

"Most people do most things for a reason."

"Yeah well, I'm not most people." She stretches, wriggling her shoulders against the wall.

"I suppose not." He looks away from her, staring blankly at nothing, and Naruto relaxes, shifting idly through her mind for a suitable subject of conversation. Then Gaara's head tilts sideways, birdlike, to face her: "I take it I am the less enticing, less risky substitute for Uchiha?"

"The fuck?"

"Come on."

"No, really, what?" she says, feeling the frown and the residual jolt, reaching behind her to explore how badly she scratched herself up, jumping with her back too close to the damn wall. "How in hell is Sasuke riskier than you?"

"Ah, right." He grins, all irony and really no pain at all, alluding without discernable movement to the facial tattoo and the sleepless bags under his eyes. "I admit I'm curious: what did she say about me?"

"That you're not an addict and you're not a rapist and you didn't kill your mother." She shrugs. "Which, not news."

A sort of wary surprise softens the sharp angles of his face. "Oh."

"Yeah," Naruto says, licking a ghost-trail of blood off her fingertip and, pulling her legs up closer to her stomach, deciding that if she bleeds through anything today, it won't be the top. She'd understand hating periods except it's whiny and contributes to the societal crap pile of dislike and disdain for women's bodies. Shifting her hips to surf on the cramps, she grins at Gaara and launches into easy chatter about how they should totally hang out this weekend, and how does he feel about _Rock Band_? because he has that drummer look going for him.

There aren't a whole lot of words coming out of Gaara, but the little twist to his mouth and the way he lets his knuckles brush against the love tattoo convey a damn lot more of substance than what follows, which is Iruka preaching about open-mindedness and golden rules and the struggle against prejudice. It's not that Naruto doesn't agree with most of it, it's just talking about it never did anybody any good, save for the bullies who learned how not to sound like bullies.

There's not a second of doubt that Sasuke could give this sermon every bit as well as Iruka, and with a good deal more rhetorical flair, and it doesn't need telling that Sasuke's quite astonishingly capable of cruelty. Just because it hasn't been directed at anyone, not really, not yet, doesn't mean it's not there, almost-tangible like the mist diffusing your breath on frosty evenings.

Then finally it's P.E., which Naruto has always pronounced as 'pee'. Abbreviations are tricky when you're only just learning to pair up letters with each other, and never let it be said Naruto was not a creative matchmaker, which in retrospect is probably why her parents didn't correct 'pee class'.

Besides, while she'll buy the physical, it's hard to find anything terribly educational about sweating and cramping and managing to keep breathing only because you'll be damned if you stop cursing Gai.

Come to think of it, maybe Iruka would get the student attention and make the lasting impact he so obviously craves by putting on some neon spandex and engaging in push-ups – the phrase _springtime of youth_ has been forever engraved onto Naruto's mind, and at this point it's really no more or less nonsensical than Iruka's phrases, seeing as Iruka's mouth is the place words come to… well, not to die perhaps, but to fall into a long hard coma.

Eyes glazing over, and mercifully so, she idly wonders if the stiltedness of Gai's grin is due to Botox. When a bloke's said "youth" fifty times in less than three minutes, you've got to wonder.

Presently he gives them a double thumbs-up and sends them running the five kilometre track as warm up.

"The man's insane," Kiba wheezes beside her. "Not even Akamaru runs in this weather, we don't need fucking warm up!"

"Excuses," Naruto tells him. "You're just scared you won't be able to keep up."

"Fuck you," Kiba says, shaking hair out of his face and lengthening his stride. "You're on."

They bicker and jog, leaving the slow-pokes trailing further and further behind them, hounded by Gai's exuberant yelling. It's not that you can't take it easy, although the proximity to Gai increases when you do. If you want to make good grades, though, you run.

More importantly, if you're not a quitter, you run.

Shortly before the halfway mark Kiba starts lagging, waving at her to go on ahead.

"Sucker!" she calls, still keeping pace with him.

Although he twitches, he manages a grin. "Nah. Only a loser would keep running."

She scrunches her face up, tosses him a grimace over her shoulder, and accelerates. This is something she can do, can do _well_, and running is great and winning is great, and there are people to catch up to.

Rock Lee is visible far in the distance, skirting an apparently unconscious Shikamaru to begin his second lap because he is a crazy person (or maybe he's a changeling, an alien implanted in a human home by his fearsome leader Gai? Because that'd actually explain a lot), but exempting the insane aliens… The heat drags, but Naruto has spent ten years running from bullies year round and grabs an easy lead.

Or so she thought, before she spots someone just ahead.

What Sasuke has to run from she doesn't know, but she keeps up.

Were she not so out of breath, Naruto'd say something, do something, but words are hard-won in Gai's classes and Sasuke, also silent, whether because of the ice princess code of conduct or lack of air, tosses her a challenging look, and after that there's only running.

A hundred meters, two hundred, three hundred, and Sasuke's still keeping pace, four hundred, five hundred, and suddenly Naruto's the one not keeping up.

Worse, she's on her arse with a broken shoe lace.

Instinct has her hand rubbing at the back of her neck as she looks up, glad she was already as red-faced as she can get.

Running in place, Sasuke looks enviably cool and collected. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Fine."

By the time Naruto's fixed the stupid shoe and got back on her feet, Sasuke's long gone and way ahead.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two:**

She still finishes third, although admittedly only because Neji's not present to beat both her and Sasuke, shuddering across the finish line high on adrenaline and lactic acid, low on air. Face and legs pounding with heat, she collapses against a tree and stares sideways at Sasuke's perfunctory stretching exercises.

The sun couldn't spoil Sasuke's pallor, and evidently neither can exercise, because her cheeks are barely pinked. It doesn't match the pulse slugging rapid and wild in the hollow of her collar bone.

Naruto hadn't planned to say, "I'd have stopped for you, you know."

"The difference is you care about beating me."

"I will yet," Naruto says, already hearing the dread sound of Gai approaching, driving a contingent of students before him.

The truly frustrating part is that she's pretty sure Sasuke wouldn't have replied anyway.

Kiba drops into a moaning heap beside her, Shino disgustingly untouchable behind his sunglasses on the far side of him, and this is when a normal teacher would let them catch their breath waiting for the stragglers to catch up, or in Shikamaru's case wake up, but Gai is not normal, and after today there can be nobody left labouring under the delusion that he is.

"All right!" he roars. "Soccer time! Boys on the left field, girls on the right. First and second of each sex picks teams."

Fortunately he himself will be going back on the track to encourage the remaining runners to pick up their pace.

In his absence Naruto follows Sasuke towards the directed patch of grass. There aren't very many girls present yet, and even Sasuke's body language reads as languid, or what passes for languid in the context of perpetually wire-tight angles and edges.

Temari stretches a pair of perfectly tanned arms, standing very close to Sasuke, close enough her movement brushes against the loose fabric of Sasuke's tshirt.

It's odd to see someone so near her, that's all.

"Well," Temari says after some length of time. "Let's get this show on the road, then."

There's really no question of who Sasuke's first choice is, which leaves Naruto in something of an awkward situation.

She never expected it to be awkward, the sudden novelty of being the picker instead of the non-picked, but it is.

"Er, Sakura, please," she says, hand back at the nape of her neck.

She doesn't really know Tenten, and Ino's turned her back on the proceedings.

Next time around is easier, because by then Kiba's would-be girlfriend has arrived. For a moment in between Naruto smiling at her and Naruto's panic being rewarded by remembrance, things threaten to go way beyond awkward, because she recalls faces not names, but thank god, thank god, she pulls through.

Flushing brightly Hinata smiles back, and two rounds later they're ready to play.

It's the death penalty lesson all over again, because Sasuke looks like Naruto's always imagined a ballerina would, with the thin over-bred butterfly lines (or actually, thanks to a certain Ballet Barbie movie, Naruto's mental image of a ballerina is both blonder and bustier, but Sasuke has that quality of etherealness and tenacity that she associates with dancers), but clearly what she practices is martial arts. After years of training it'd be impossible for Naruto not to recognise the stances and turns, however modified, that make Sasuke's feints and tackles so devastating and nasty.

Twelve minutes into the game, going by Gai's insistent shouting over by the boys' field, the ball chances to approach Hinata, and Sasuke is too close to her by far.

Naruto gives it all she's got and runs.

Because that thought she had before, about Sasuke not having been cruel, that's sort of person-specific. Saying what she did to Naruto wasn't cruel, but saying it to Hinata would be. Just like tackling Naruto would be a challenge, but tackling Hinata would be abuse.

She really doesn't want Sasuke to cross that line.

Skidding over the grass, she tumbles into Sasuke, and it's the kind of situation Mum insists only ever occurs in fiction even though it happens to Naruto all the damn time; Sasuke twists under the impact but clearly didn't expect it, can't keep her footing, and a resentful glare later they're on the ground, Sasuke's knees cutting into Naruto's stomach.

"Ouch," Sasuke says with great dignity and greater rage. Clearly hell hath no fury like a woman tackled. "Get the hell off!"

Sucking in a sharp breath, because Sasuke's demand was accompanied by a vicious jerk of her knee, Naruto plants an elbow on either side of Sasuke's hips and glares right back.

"Quit it! Look, I will get up, cut it the hell out trying to kick me."

If her legs didn't ache already from the running, they do now from the fall, and the grass stain on Sasuke's arm is accompanied by a fairly large abrasion. She's still panting a little. Naruto wonders if it might possibly be from sheer fury.

"Er, sorry," she offers, gaining her feet and extending a hand Sasuke pointedly ignores. "It's just I couldn't let you…"

"For god's sake!" Sasuke snaps, standing up considerably faster than Naruto did and aggressively brushing dirt off her shorts. "Like I'd ever tackle Hinata."

Sauntering up to them with a raised eyebrow, Temari interjects, "You all right?"

"Yeah," Naruto says while Sasuke snorts and turns her back, marching away towards the others.

"Right, then," Temari says, following her and nodding at Naruto and Hinata to come along. "Let's avoid attracting Gai's attention, shall we."

"Fuck yeah."

"Yes," Hinata agrees very timidly, her voice soft as cream.

It's not a large playing field by any stretch of the imagination; the syllable has barely met the air before the ball meets Naruto's foot, and with a grin she kicks it back, picking up her pace to follow it.

Sasuke keeps her distance, doesn't brush past Naruto again before Gai blows his whistle and enthuses about them being wonderful, lively creatures of spring and youth who should enjoy their muscles crying with joy from the workout, then finally sends them off to the showers.

Stuck in the tepid mass of undressing bodies, Naruto is hit with the fact that in spite of everything she really _likes_ changing rooms, likes the idea of people just being naked together.

She remembers Chouji saying he hates them and someone from another class adding it's distressing to have the intimacy of stripping forced upon you.

Which Naruto sort of gets, but also sort of doesn't, since obviously lots of people are body-shy, but she isn't and she's not even sure she'd want to understand how to feel that way, because really changing rooms should be about bodies not having to be a big deal.

And, well, Naruto likes bodies, likes the warmth and promise and solidity of their physicality. Also there's something, for lack of a better word, open-minded about stripping down alongside strangers.

Chancing a smile at Hinata, who's blushing at her over the cocoon she's turned her towel into, Naruto moves through the montage of limbs and idle sounds towards the showers, starting to sweat again because the window's been bolted shut.

What stays with her afterwards is the raised circle of scar tissue marking out the centre of Sasuke's shoulder blade.

xxxxx

Thursday dawns chilly, or what passes for chilly this time of year, a faint sheen of mist tempering the air. It's cool enough Naruto is able to sprint for the bus stop and catch the bus she's actually supposed to be on, arriving at school with time to spare rather than slightly late for the first time.

Unaccustomed to the extra time and still absent-minded from sleep, she takes to wandering the main building; passing by an exit, she catches sight of someone leaning against the outside wall, smoking. Only after she's already edged the door open and slunk through, her mouth curving into a smile quite without her volition, does she realise she had no real proof it was Sasuke she saw. It was, though, it's Sasuke staring skyward, slouching in her too-big jumper, her lips and fingers curling around a cigarette. However Naruto is rather more concerned with the spectacle of two guys circling a kid who must've decided to take the shortcut across Sannin Academy on his way to school.

Spurting forward, she catches hold of the closest guy's arm before he can cuff the kid. "What the hell are you doing!"

"The hell are _you_ doing, bitch?"

It's not the first time Naruto's had this conversation, but she still doesn't have any words for it; rather, there are too many words, and none of them seem useful, until the only natural argument is a fist in someone's face, and she can't do that, can't blow everything up.

Iruka said once, or said some philosopher or other had said, whichever, that there are instances of 'if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you': times when a concept is so basic it has to be grasped organically, or when the person you're trying to explain to is so far away you can't reach each other.

Naruto felt the first tentative stirring of genuine respect when he added that he thought that was a coward's way of thought.

"Stopping you being a bullying arse. Leave him alone."

The guy she grabbed has turned to face her, back against the kid, and when the other bully pauses to laugh at her the kid seizes the opportunity and runs like hell, his arms swinging with something like desperation but a triumphant whoop lingering behind as he disappears around a corner.

It turns ugly very quickly, since the vaguely familiar wannabe bullies insist on there not being any harm in administering some peer education regarding kids not being welcome to frolic over their property, particularly when the kid is snotty and has been known to paint graffiti while passing through, and Naruto insists that the proper course of action would be to send the kid to Iruka for a talking to if he's really such trouble. This evolves into some rather heated debate about teacher's pets and where the line goes between bullying and a firm admonishing, and what's decent behaviour anyway, and who asked you to pass judgement?

Teacher's pet? Wow.

It doesn't have quite the same ring as queer retarded bitch whore.

Then quite suddenly Sasuke says, "Enough."

It doesn't seem quite real: one moment there are loud voices and absurd insults and grabbing hands, then that one word and the next there's scuffling shoes and Naruto is alone in the silence with its speaker.

It seems very real when she looks at Sasuke.

With her pulse still picking at her skull as though trying to break through it, Naruto stares in something like awe, like rage, at Sasuke not really doing anything at all and yet being so much, so intensely there.

She meant to say, to not quite scream: And why the fuck were you just standing there?

She says, not quite screams: "I don't need your help!"

"Really?" Eyes hard and dark and something else, something complicated and aggravating, Sasuke stares at the whisker scars, and Naruto goes bone-cold.

"No," she says.

Sasuke doesn't reply beyond the standard raised eyebrow; checks her watch, shrugs, and goes inside.

It isn't the first time Naruto's had this conversation but it's the first time it's not ended with her beaten up.

xxxxx

Friday is golden, sunlight gilding every surface. Golden too is Iruka's expansive mood, which allows them to finish the otherwise trying day, seemingly designed to drive home the fact that math is not only entirely useless but also extraordinarily painful, on a light note.

Naruto's not sure how exactly the movie is supposed to relate to the anti-ism project, seeing as it's about what her mum, in one of the stress-crazed harangues prompted by finishing her graduate thesis on _The Gendered Gaze in_… er, in some art guy's work, might have called two cis-gendered, fully abled, white, heterosexual middle class twins who, to the profound disappointment of half the class, are not sleeping together. Still, it's a goddamn awesome movie all the same.

Since Naruto also tears up over Disney movies, her crying when the smart twin dies in a traffic accident might not in itself be indicative of cinematic genius, but she's not the only one whose eyes are getting glossy.

"So," Iruka says at last, clearly trying to maintain a suitably solemn tone in spite of his success as he cuts off the credits. "That was the movie adaption of Peter Pohl's novel _I Miss You, I Miss You_. I hope it gave you some food for thought – I see we don't have any time left today, but we'll be discussing it next week. Until then, everyone have a good weekend."

It's one of _those_ movies, the ones that leave you new inside, bloated and unbalanced, as if things inside you have been shifted around to make room for what the film imparted. Feeling blotchy, she waves to Kiba taking off with Shino and Chouji, and to Sakura saying she'll be in touch about the anti-ism planning later. Lucky bastards whose busses actually come by more than twice a day.

Left to wait, and feeling … not just good, but oddly full, Naruto heads accidentally on purpose towards the toilets. For one reason or another she hasn't been to a school bathroom since she got her face cut up in one, and now she opens the door with baited breath, but stepping inside is nothing special and nothing very much like last time.

Sannin Academy is posh and proud of it, and certainly keeps the toilets fresh, with none of the filth or graffiti she'd have expected, just a faint unpleasant smell caught in the tidy white-tiled room. Only one of the booths is occupied; only Ino is standing in front of a mirror adjusting her ponytail.

"Er," Naruto offers. "Hi."

"Hi," Ino replies, not taking her eyes off the reflection of that single closed door. Even when it's pushed open and Sasuke emerges, Ino keeps talking to the mirror: "Putting our fingers down our throat again, were we?" The _anorexic bitch_ is added in enough of an undertone to be discreet, but not enough of one not to be audible.

"Unlike some people," Sasuke says, "I'm not quite that desperately in need of dieting."

Ino blanches. "Look, I was just… I'm sorry, okay."

"Fuck off," Sasuke says. "You're not my friend, and despite whatever delusions you harbour on that account, you're nowhere near being my social rival either. So really, fuck off."

"Fine," Ino says, looking down; looking fragile and determined as she leaves. "All right, fine."

After the door has swung shut behind Ino but before Sasuke can leave as well, or try to order her out too, Naruto says, "Why would you do that?"

For a moment Sasuke stares at her blankly. Her face is white and her lips mutely parted around another _fuck off_, but she doesn't say it. When things get bad, get really bad, they silence Naruto, but Sasuke, who seems so quiet even when she talks, apparently puts words between herself and the bad shit.

"Because," she says with a big blank smile, glittery like fake diamonds, "as a girl raised in a patriarchal society, I've been taught to despise myself and turn my rage inwards, so that when frustration turns to violence I attempt to assert control over the situation by directing the aggression towards my own body. It's called a coping mechanism." She leans forward to inspect something in the mirror, adding in a tone of weary disgust, "Or so my therapist keeps telling me."

Ignoring the clichés, which obviously aren't lies, exactly, but equally obviously are too simple to be truth, Naruto focuses on the central issue: "Actually I think that's called self-harm."

"Well," Sasuke says lightly. "I needed something to replace the cutting, didn't I."

"Cutting," Naruto repeats.

Mercurial and strange, this is not how she's ever pictured Sasuke. Or, strange, yes, but not with these brittle mood swings, not saying, "God, you dipshit, as if I'd cut. Emo is out, even you should've picked up on that."

"Um. Hey," Naruto says, through the weirdness of Sasuke clearly having learnt from whatever idiot therapist she's been seeing how to lie with little bits of truth, how to use words to avoid communication. "Tell me."

Very astonishingly, Sasuke does. Sort of.

She sounds like she's in shock or something, like one of those news anchors who are new on the job so you can tell they're cheating, reading their lines off a prompter.

"Thirteen months ago I was in a traffic accident. With this guy. Who died." When she laughs, mouth half obscured by the hand covering her face, it sounds like a cough, rusty and thick. "Well technically he's comatose, but that's just semantics, isn't it. He might as well be dead for all the good he is now. Fuck, he is dead, they just haven't turned off the heat and air yet."

"Sasuke…" She's standing close now, standing helpless, horrified, and yet… alight with, with _trust_, with _you're talking to me_.

"It's not like it's a secret," Sasuke interrupts. "Everybody knows."

Really? Because if so, what the hell kind of business did Iruka think he had showing what amounts to a trigger flick? It doesn't seem like him at all.

"Well," Naruto says, and this she knows: "It's not like that makes it matter any less."

Sasuke sneers at her. "Don't. You don't get to think I'm a pseudo-psychotic fascist bitch and then pretend to give a shit. Lay off." She says _pseudo-psychotic fascist bitch_ very levelly, without any hint of accusation.

"Still caring is kind of what makes me _not_ a psycho bitch." Her wrist burning where it almost touches Sasuke's arm, she tries a bit of a grin, because this is the kind of bad that's way beyond the scope of conventional grief respecting practices, and Naruto's never been any good with solemnity. "Also I don't think that's all you are."

"Spare me." She swallows, but her voice is even and supercilious. "I neither want nor need your sanctimony. I'm not your friend."

"No? Then why are you talking to me?"

Talking to me about things hurting so much you can't stand them, talking to me about _this guy_, which in Sasuke's voice means _my guy_, means, _this guy who I love_.

Amazingly, Sasuke doesn't actually sound nasty as she says, "Because you're nobody." There's a smirk, sudden and elusive, and then quite a lot of nastiness after all. "I could tell you anything, it doesn't matter what you know because it doesn't matter what you think. I realise probably somewhere in your head there's like a Kantian category reinterpreting reality into something in which your sad existence isn't pointless, but the reality is you're nothing." She tilts her head to the side with an expression almost of curiosity. "It's funny, really – you're no one, and you're the last to know it. Well. People are bullied for a reason."

Naruto thinks about the kid on the schoolyard yesterday, she thinks about herself, but most of all she thinks about Sasuke as she snaps, "People are bullied because there are arsehole bullies who can't lay the hell off them."

"I don't care what lies you tell yourself. It doesn't change anything."

"Shut up."

Relentless, Sasuke does not seem to have heard her. Well, if you're nobody you can just stay quiet, right?

"You're still nothing. You'll always be nothing."

"Shut up. _Shut up!_"

Sasuke does when Naruto hits her.

"I heard scream– Naruto!" someone says behind her over the oddly sharp sound of her hand impacting with Sasuke's face, snapping it sideways.

Flesh meeting flesh normally causes a heavy sort of noise, but maybe it makes sense for Sasuke to be atypical. She's always doing that, looking at you like you're _real_, because she would never see anybody who didn't matter, then saying you're nobody, you're nothing.

Naruto makes to step closer, crowd her, whether to hit her again or touch her or shake her she isn't sure, but a hand grabs onto her arm and keeps her in place.

Right. Iruka.

"Stay put," he orders, then turns to Sasuke. "Are you all right?"

The act of straightening alone, facing forward again and adjusting her shirt, is proof Sasuke qualifies as an ice princess; measured, immaculate, her face absolutely blank.

Naruto is anything but, fracturing around too strong emotions and too many questions.

"I'm fine," says Sasuke.

"Good," says Iruka. "Then you're both coming with me to the headmistress."

Herded through the mostly empty corridors, in a private silence unbroken by outside noises, with Iruka's hand not gripping anymore but just a warm presence on her arm, a reassurance almost, Naruto notices Sasuke's neatness and prettiness in a new way, a way that has to do with how proper and expensive her clothes are, and how convincing she can sound, and how much authority figures always love that.

The vividly red place where Naruto hit her is an extreme contrast to her collected pallor; looks like vandalism.

Naruto's been dragged off to the headmaster's office for brawling, or any number of other offences, most of which at least loosely based on reality, countless times before, and she knows how it usually ends. While Tsunade is supposed to be her grandmother, and while Iruka has always seemed fair under the naivety, there's an "estranged" to go before "grandmother", and probably you wouldn't need even half of Iruka's naivety to consider Sasuke the resident Miss Perfect.

When they reach the green door bearing Tsunade's name Iruka doesn't bother waiting, but knocks on and opens it in the same one move, ushering both of them in before him.

Tsunade looks up from a stack of papers and a glass, reclining in her desk chair with a rather testy, "Yes?"

Naruto doesn't listen very closely to Iruka's narrating how he passed by the girls' bathroom and heard yelling, then found them fighting, walking in on Naruto getting violent.

She looks at the antique desk and into the sun-blasted greenery outside the window, until finally Tsunade demands attention. Most headmistresses can't do that, that thing when they just look at you and you don't even need to be looking back to know that it's time you listen, and listen well.

"Right, then. Does either of you contest Iruka's version of events?"

"No," Sasuke says, and Naruto shakes her head.

"Then," Tsunade continues, piercing Naruto with a glare in that way that's also really, devastatingly, rare, "I take it Miss Uchiha deserved it?"

Fake understanding she's met before, and mocking, but this particular combination is new. It doesn't matter.

"Yes. No." She struggles, embarrassed, horrified. "I mean. What she said wasn't okay, but it wasn't all right for me to hit her either."

"And what did she says?"

Naruto finds herself saying, "Nothing."

It's not because she doesn't rat people out. It's not because she doesn't think she'd be believed.

Mind, she doesn't rat people out and she doesn't think she'd be believed, but that's not why she clings to secrecy.

It's no one else's business.

"Sasuke?"

"We were debating people's ability to avoid unpleasant situations," Sasuke says, not quite ironically.

Naruto supposes it's even kind of true, if you're a spoilt idiot who thinks of systematic abuse as an unpleasant situation.

"And that's what set off this… incident?"

"Evidently," Sasuke says coolly, every eye in the room focused on the redness smearing her cheek.

That's when the lectures start, as if Naruto didn't know violence is an unacceptable response, doesn't know it's a potentially expelling offence, especially when the victim's daddy is a self-important prosecutor.

Sasuke's been sitting immovable and distantly pretty in one of the visitors' chairs for a good long while when they're done, and she nods along with leaving "this regrettable incident" in the past.

Naruto, who's been standing there nodding and not doing much else, stares at her with something that's not quite surprise, then hurriedly turns her attention back to getting out of here.

She's missed the bus now, she thinks, walking doggedly beside Sasuke through the main corridor. She'll have to go down to Central Station and wait for the next one.

Through the door, and the outside air is dumpy, thick.

They aren't kicking her out. Fuck, they aren't even punishing her. Tsunade might tell Dad, in fact probably will, but Iruka said nothing about calling, so presumably it'll be a family thing not a school discipline thing when Tsunade does.

Is it… do they know, then, about Sasuke's beauty being barely skin-deep? Or are they, what? Trying to keep things quiet, hoping it'll blow over? Sasuke did remain crazy calm the whole time.

And that stops her short, belatedly, because Naruto remembers being hit for the first time, that nauseating twist in reality into someone's hand on your face, doing violence to you, and so it's inconceivable that Sasuke wouldn't have reacted to the slap-punch hybrid Naruto dealt her. Hell, it wasn't even an active non-reaction, it was that she simply didn't react.

That is to say, there is, or there can be, a difference between the two, like there can be a difference between being quiet and just not saying anything. She'd not have been surprised at Sasuke being quiet, staying blank, but her just failing to react – that's wrong.

Sasuke's not staying silent now, though.

"If you ever touch me again expulsion will be the least of your worries."

"I, yeah," Naruto says, relief tugging forcibly at her face. "I mean, I wasn't going to. But you'd better not give me reason to again."

Not replying, this time very actively not replying, Sasuke veers off sharply to the left, towards the fancy part of town. Naruto's left alone with the smell of boiling tarmac and the sound of fornicating insects.

She walks, she catches the bus, and she fumes and she's elated and nothing makes sense. Which, well, sense is overrated, but.

The weekend is hell.

She comes home late and Mum's snapping at her, stressed and annoyed about managing the new classes and having some difficult patients, and now also about Naruto not being on time, so that everything's been delayed and she'll be late.

"I'm sorry," Naruto says. "You didn't have to wait."

"I promised I'd drop you off at the garage before I went to work. I just – I'm sorry, I know you didn't mean to be late, but I've got a bit of a tight schedule here and I think you're old enough to show some consideration."

Naruto doesn't say sorry again, because while she is sorry, she's also angry, and frustrated, and really confused, and she doesn't do so well with words.

That was certainly proven today.

"Are we going, then?" she says instead, and Mum picks up her purse and her new nurse shoes and ushers her hurriedly to the car.

The drive is silent. Mum leans over and kisses her cheek before taking off, but it's still a relief to get out of the car.

You don't get used to being a disappointment. Rather, you do, but you also grow goddamn tired of it.

Kiba's there already, giving a lazy wave from over by the Volvo; they're not allowed to touch the car they actually joy-rode into the vehicle equivalent of the ER, but have been directed to work off their dept on less refined machinery.

An hour's good, two, but it's Friday and Kiba's taking off early, there's a family dinner and then there's Shino. And, possibly, some pseudo-stalkerish attempt at befriending Hinata.

"You're not going with them?" Dad asks afterwards, when Naruto's sitting on the cement, letting its coldness soak her. "The dog brigade, I mean."

"Nah. It's their – you know, their thing. It's like the bff version of makeup sex." She leans under the car to look for the screwdriver and also to hide, a little. "You know he started hanging out with me because he and Shino weren't talking."

"I'm sure that's not the only reason…"

"I know!" she cuts him off. "I know, I know."

It's cool and safe under the car, but increasingly uncomfortable, and the smell's bloody awful. She crawls out.

"Er, Dad? I got in a fight. I – I didn't mean to, and they're not doing anything about it or anything. But I – I guess I should tell you before Tsunade does."

"What was the fight about?"

"Nothing. Stuff. She said some things."

Except it wasn't really about that. No, it was, but not only.

It was about ice princesses melting and cracking a bit, as well, and Naruto not right knowing how to handle that.

But mostly it was about bullying, and about how having a crappy life isn't a good excuse to indulge in it.

"I don't want to talk about it," she says. "Damn it, just talk to Tsunade."

"All right, then," says Dad, with a sigh and that hurt slump of his shoulders.

Later that night Tsunade calls, and Naruto jumps from the table to pick up the phone. It's strange she should be so positively weak-kneed with relief that Mum or Dad didn't answer; she's already told Dad, after all. Still.

Hi, she says, and Tsunade says, Hello Naruto could I speak to Minato, and Naruto walks back into the kitchen to hand over the phone. She's glad when Dad retreats outside for the conversation, then ashamed when she sneaks a glance at Mum, who chews energetically on a carrot stick and doesn't comment.

"Um," Naruto starts, but doesn't know how to finish. Things went to shit so quickly in the bathroom.

Which, yeah – no, she's never been that good with words.

Maybe to make up for that, words being so important to Mum, important enough that sometimes Naruto thinks the sentences describing them matter more than the pictures themselves to her even though she's supposed to be an art student, Naruto gets up again and starts picking up the dirty dishes.

Of course, today she doesn't seem to be doing so well with her hands either, because she trips on the kitchen carpet and drops two of the plates.

Not the favourites, at least, she thinks, not quite numbly and not quite grimly but distressingly closer to it than she's been since they moved.

"Ah, fuck."

"Jesus," Mum mutters, then adds, "Watch your language" before retrieving the broom from its hiding place.

Naruto spends the remains of the evening in her room.

By the time Dad comes by to say goodnight the place is a mess of things that have failed to amuse her, failed to relive the restless, palpable anxiety, and the hard rhythms of indie rock is lulling her to sleep.

"Good night," she – she'd like to say she mutters it, but really it's a whisper, unhelpfully wistful. Things could be… better.

Well. Tomorrow they will be, you'd better believe it.

She clutches at Kyuubi, one hand closing defiantly around the tail of the old plushie, familiar and dear. One of the good things about summer ending is the nights growing dark again, so you can rest safely in your earth, and soon enough she does fall asleep. That's never been a problem.

Waking up sort of is, this time, because, as compared to Friday night, Saturday morning is brighter only on the surface manifest layer. Nothing's easier.

She kicks the sheets off with more aggression than joyous energy, questing downstairs for breakfast and a run of Gaian proportions.

Sasuke says, or said really but it feels like present tense, feels like says: You're nothing.

That you're nobody and you deserved it, that's not exactly inventive, any schoolyard bully can tell you that.

Given time, Naruto supposes they can even make you listen, and believe it. She didn't, but then they never told her, _or so my therapist keeps telling me_.

And this is …fucking shallow, really, but they didn't look like Sasuke, and more importantly they didn't look at _her_ like Sasuke does, either.

Naruto runs from a stupid conversation on the school steps and, and that dumb argument in class, and, damn it, from that P.E. lesson.

"You're home," Mum remarks when Naruto emerges from the shower, reclining on the porch with her laptop balanced on her knees. "I thought you'd be off with Kiba."

"Yeah, no," Naruto says, right back where she started running from. "Not today."

Later Dad finds her inside and asks doesn't she have any homework, then?

While Naruto must grant him the point that pouting around the house is not very productive, that's only a theoretical point because she doesn't do pouting. Doesn't have the mouth for it, nor the patience.

"None I feel like doing," she says, and it doesn't work as a joke because frankly it's true.

"Naruto…"

And she's so fucking tired of hearing Naruto, don't you know better, Naruto shouldn't you control yourself, Naruto there aren't infinite chances here.

Nobody told Sasuke she'd better consider her actions more carefully in the future.

"I'm sixteen years old," she says, feeling like the goddamn little mermaid. "I'm not a child anymore. Whether I do my homework or not isn't really any of your business."

She feels like shit about the words even before she's spoken them, but she can't regret them because this moment they're so true they cut.

"You'll always be my business," Dad says. "Mum and I, we're just worried. There's this whole future ahead of you, and I know it's difficult to focus on that now but it's important. That's why we worry about academia."

"Well, you do that," Naruto snaps. "I'm kind of busy trying to survive the present, myself."

She retreats outside, not because she wants to avoid him as such, god she doesn't, but because she doesn't want to say any more nasty stuff, and there's so much of that trying to break out of her.

"Well," Dad says, after he's followed her to the shadow under the plum tree, where's she's made herself uncomfortable leaning against the trunk, knees drawn up to far they brush her boobs. Given the distinctly modest size of the latter, that's something of an accomplishment. "When I was your age I wanted to be a police officer. Or a mayor. Or maybe a travel agent. So I guess there's plenty of time yet. I just think it'd be good if you had something concrete to aspire to, to make the school stuff more relevant."

She smiles up at him, wanly and with her eyes squinted practically shut against the sun, but genuinely. "I'm gonna be a rock star."

She can hear the grin in his voice, and the worry lines around it. "In that case you might want to try learning an instrument."

"Hey!" Naruto objects. "I give great _Guitar Hero_!"

There's no way he, nor any sane non-deaf person, could possibly argue against that, and for a while things are better.

Still, Sasuke said, _you'll always be nothing_, and Kiba's MIA, and, well.

Naruto has never been one of those secretly cool losers, like Sheldon Cooper or Peter Parker or Willow Rosenberg. She's not secretly pretty or super smart, or an astonishingly good person, who was just oppressed by a shallow, non-comprehending society. She really is just completely awkward.

So she's not a cool loser but a loser loser, because of which it kind of matters a whole lot more than it should what the local ice princess has to say on the subject of her mattering or existing.

Besides, if she's honest, and Naruto's not good enough with words for lying to work, that's not the worst of it by far.

The worst is that regardless of everything that came after, the voice she cannot escape says, _I can tell you anything_, and even now Naruto feels sick from it, feverish.

If _you're nothing_ means _I can tell you anything_, doesn't it follow that _you're nobody, you don't matter to anyone_ means _you're somebody to me, you matter to me_?

Something more than a replacement friend or a pity case.

"Shut up!" she sneers, snaps, gasps at herself.

Jesus, this is mental.

Sunday isn't any better, and she ambles out of the house to meet Gaara in the park. He likes feeding the pigeons; she realises it wasn't a random impulse but a sustained habit, catching him again surrounded by a snowstorm of birds. Standing in the middle of the winged storm distributing bread crumbs, he looks small and scruffy and like the antithesis of a scarecrow.

Naruto wades through the birds and stands next to him for a bit, but she's restless. Scuffs her feet, jangles what little change her pocket holds, until she can't stand it anymore and pushes him into motion. The pigeons follow them, or him rather, as they start making their way around the lake.

"I used to kick them," Gaara says, in a low and rather contemplative voice. "The pigeons, I mean. They called me the pigeon kicker."

Naruto stares at him in disbelief. "Who the hell calls someone the pigeon kicker?"

He shrugs. "People. Soccer mums. You know. People from school."

"Well, I guess it's not really any worse than Dr Octopus."

"I guess not," he agrees. He's dressed in what looks like his sugar daddy's clothes, although knowing Gaara it's more likely the skin of his downed enemies. Naruto likes oversize herself, but the bright colours and baggy lines make him smaller and paler, a very little boy needing a very big hug.

Naruto touches his arm, roughly enough he can take it as a punch if he likes.

She's glad when he reciprocates, even though it'll leave a bruise, but it fizzles out when he says, "What's up? You're all," he gestures, a jagged move, "all broken and jittery." His eyes are flat and level, and not answering would be cheating, would be something she can't do to him.

"I, er, got into a bit of a fight."

"Kiba?" he asks with a calm that is suddenly dangerous.

"Sasuke."

"Oh." He deflates abruptly. "That's more… complicated."

"Yeah. No. It shouldn't be." She squares her shoulders, but can't quite lift her gaze from the ground. The threat of violence has sunk back down through Gaara's pores, but violence was never the issue: violence Naruto understands. It upsets her and occasionally it frightens her, but she can handle it, she knows it, owns it.

Sasuke, on the other hand, is balancing on that fine unravelling line between friendly teasing and cold-faced abuse. Has actually fallen down on both sides of it several times, but unfairly ignores this and just gets back up on it again.

Enough is enough, Naruto decides. The least she deserves is some basic clarity. She blurts, "D'you know where she lives?"

"Yes," Gaara says immediately, point-blank. "In what amounts to a castle, complete with a number of dragons." He pauses. "I could give you her number."

"You've got it? Yes please!"

He shrugs a little, dislodging the neckline of his sweater. Drowning in layers of thick fabric he should be sweating buckets in the intense late-summer sunlight, but he looks icy. Maybe it's a rich kid thing, maybe he and Sasuke have miniscule ACs sewn into their clothes. "She's friends with Temari. Temari's my sister." He finds his mobile in a pocket and manipulates it with rather clumsy finger-stabs before letting it slip back out of sight. "There. I've texted it."

"Thanks." She can't stand people delving into phone conversations when in irl company, so tingly frustration aside it's pretty fortunate she forgot her mobile at home. She always does, much to Mum's chagrin, but it's not as though anybody calls her.

She took the bus home but is winded when she grabs her phone, which is suddenly heavy with the significance of Gaara's text.

It's a mobile number, she realises. No need for landlines, anymore.

She dials it.

TBC

_I Miss You, I Miss You_ is a real book, written by children's and YA author Peter Pohl and based on the story of the surviving twin. It is, as Naruto puts it, a bloody awesome book, though unfortunately the English translation leaves a lot to be desired. I believe recently a film adaption actually has been made under the original Swedish title _Jag saknar dig, jag saknar dig. _


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter contains: **excessive academic name-dropping (by swot), implied transphobia, casual ableism

**Chapter Three**

After the sixth signal the fourth time, three hours later, Sasuke picks up.

"Yes?"

Dad's phone-voice is rugged and studiously good-humoured, Mum's is light and very fast. Sasuke's is succinct and sharp as her cut-glass accent, never more pronounced.

"Hi," Naruto says into the immense distance, and also into the phone. She isn't sure how to hold it, hasn't used it enough to know where it should be positioned to work best with mouth and ear. "It's me. Um, it's Naruto."

Sasuke hangs up. It's another eleven tries before she picks up again. In the meantime Gaara calls and asks if she really felt it necessary to inform Sasuke of who leaked her number.

But I didn't, Naruto protests.

Gaara sighs in that way that's the vocal equivalent of a shrug, and she guesses it doesn't matter, then, whether he believes her.

"Yes, well," he says. "I should have known better." He hangs up as fast as the words are out.

Presently she has finally got Sasuke to press accept instead of decline, but she's not saying anything.

"I wanted to talk to you," Naruto blurts into the silence.

"About what?"

"I was hoping that'd come to me." She could say, _I'm sorry_, because it's not all right to hit someone for grieving, regardless of circumstances.

On the other hand Sasuke was and presumably still is a right bitch about it, and it's fucking well not all right to say the stuff she did either.

Also Naruto guesses a form of mutual apology was infused in the few choppy sentences from outside, after Tsunade's office.

"Idiot," Sasuke says, but this time Naruto's all right with it, with the light insult and the silence of Sasuke hanging up on her again.

They're back on level ground now, never mind if level ground seems like a wire pulled tight between dangerous extremes.

xxxxx

Next week Sasuke ignores her utterly, but it's a private, rather muted kind of ignoring, decidedly at odds with the official sort that spreads outward like rings on water after a stone's been thrown and been drowned, spilling through the popular groups and down lower until it encompasses the entire student body.

The disconcerting aspect is how much Naruto notices, when nobody else seems to.

Sakura finds her during lunch, flushed with success as she explains she's mostly done with the planning. "I'll need Iruka to approve it, of course, and there are some last chinks to be worked through, but…" She smiles. "Do you know Haku?"

"Er, no. Should I?"

"I'll introduce you. You see, I was hoping to pair you up to lead one of the seminars – are you willing to do some extra reading?"

"Depends what kind of reading," Naruto tries. Homework eats too much of her time without Sakura adding to it, but unlike homework this might possibly be interesting.

"Well, ideally some Butler and Foucault to start with, and if you'd like to branch out maybe some Wittig, I think she's a bit radical myself but I reckon you might like her, and personally I think there's something to be said for Jameson. I mean, I'm not a Marxist, but some of his non-political writing is quite interesting."

Naruto, who is a socialist, has never heard of Jameson; dimly recognises Foucault from Mum's required readings.

"Um," she says.

"That's the general stuff," Sakura goes on, "but, well, more specifically I was hoping you'd read up, or were willing to read up, on transsexualism. It's not really what the seminar's about, but some jerk always brings it up, you know?"

"I can try," Naruto says. She's fuzzy on the subject but probably Mum can bring her up to speed. "Just, why would anybody bring it up?"

"Well, because of Haku. She's – right over there, see? In white, with the long brown hair."

Naruto follows her gaze to an inordinately beautiful girl sitting alone at a corner table. Haku is model-tall and model-thin, prettier even than Sasuke, with the sort of determined mildness that leads Naruto's thoughts to mothers.

"If you're not sure," Sakura says, "then I'll work something else out."

"It'll be fine," Naruto says, then goggles when realisation hits. Haku makes a more convincing girl than Naruto ever has, regardless of what sort of body's under the dress. That's why some arsehole would bring it up.

"Let me know as soon as you can, all right?" Sakura asks. "You see, I'm double-booked already, and Sasuke's the only one I know has done the appropriate reading; Shikamaru's so lazy, and Temari's not gone in that direction."

Naruto isn't sure she wants to know, when things are so tenuous with Sasuke, but she can't help asking, demanding really: "Then why don't you pair her up with Sasuke?"

Sakura's mouth thins unhappily. "Haku doesn't need that." She hurries to add, presumably as a result of Naruto's enraged frown: "Oh, Sasuke's never been less than perfectly polite to Haku, but she's had a difficult time lately and now I'm not sure I'd want to risk it."

Naruto translates that to mean that Sasuke's inner bitch only truly came out to play after the accident. And she already slapped her around for that, so is left feeling sad rather than angry.

Picking up her tray and following Sakura towards the bins then towards English, she shrugs it off. She's tired of thinking of Sasuke, sick of it, and anyway Mondays are gloomy enough just by virtue of all the weekdays to follow; what Naruto needs is some positive input, like a long good look at fairytale princess beautiful Haku.

Even better, after classes are over Chouji too is left in school, another victim of the erratic bus schedule, and they head towards what Chouji declares to be the best café in town to meet up with Shikamaru.

It really is a very nice café – the kind of nice that makes Naruto feel distinctly uncomfortable with her awkward manners and cheap clothes. Makes her want to yell and throw things around. Chouji angles himself between the tables with the steady, determined ease born of diligent practice, and Naruto scampers after him, relived to reach the designated table without incident.

Shikamaru's presence in the establishment makes a lot more sense once Naruto spots the two girls he's sharing the table with. Although Naruto can only imagine she feels neutral at best about them interrupting, Temari nods in greeting; Sasuke studiously ignores them.

She has a variation of that circus princess/contortionist pose going on, legs stretched out but bent oddly over each other, lips and fingers curling around a cigarette rather like Gollum might curl around his one ring. Judging by the number of butts on the saucer, it's not her first by far.

Naruto decides to take her not protesting the added company as a good sign, and pulls out a chair. It's all red velvet and engraved tree, a bit like a throne from a grade school play, and utterly magnificent.

She ends up facing Sasuke across the table, or she would be if Sasuke looked up from her cigarette. It's obvious the staff must have noticed her smoking, but nobody's asking her to please go outside, probably because she's doing that Sasuke thing again, owning the room, enhancing it somehow by her mere presence in it.

Maybe someone should explain to her that she's obviously taken a wrong turn, got lost in a world where there aren't supposed to be any real princesses left, and so she shouldn't act like one, and more importantly shouldn't be treated like one.

Indeed probably someone should start a revolution, and Naruto is half prepared to take up the task, except Chouji would never turn against Sasuke at a moment when she'll let them have cake.

Glancing over his shoulder at the menu, Naruto discovers fancy script but no understandable words or prices. Chouji seems to know his way around it, though, perusing it with obvious delight.

Meanwhile Sasuke, who really could do with some more fat and sugar, continues just sitting; silent, smoking, superior.

Why is it obvious, her belonging in the sort of place too good for everyday English, too good for people who need to care about prices? What exactly is it that makes it plain as day that Sasuke's simple top is the expensive kind of simple? The charisma itself is one thing, but Naruto isn't interested in clothes and never has been; she shouldn't be able to tell if they're posh.

But she can, just like the wait staff are obviously aware Sasuke is what amounts to a VIP, in spite of how, to be honest, she doesn't dress ostentatiously, the only jewellery on her person is a simple metal band circling her left thumb, she doesn't even wear any makeup.

It may, she wryly reflects, have something to do with Sasuke magically exuding the attitude that the reason for this, for the lack of makeup, is that , quote, if you need makeup to be pretty you're a hopeless case and shouldn't embarrass yourself by trying, unquote.

Naruto, who can't be bothered with makeup because why waste time and money on the commercialisation and objectification of women as sexual objects, had gaped at her.

Sasuke'd smirked. "The body's artificial, just like everything else, at least in all the ways that matter. That's not what I'm objecting to."

"Then what are you objecting to? Cause you don't exactly strike me as the type to celebrate a healthy natural body."

"Well, no. Of course not. I just find it pathetic to sell out aspiring to an ideal you can't actually achieve, particularly such a paltry ideal as mainstream beauty."

Of course people who look like Sasuke can afford to consider it paltry, much like people looking like Naruto can: it's easy to disregard something you're either comprehensively above or utterly below. The trickiness, the heartache over it, happens to the people in between, to the almosts.

Her reverie is interrupted by the waiter coming by to take their orders. Chouji asks for a number of… things…, and as Temari and Shikamaru have been previously served, the waiter turns an askance glance at Naruto after it's become clear that Sasuke intends to remain basically catatonic.

Looking away from Sasuke staring blankly at the opposite wall, Naruto scratches the back of her head.

"Er, do you have cinnamon buns?"

They do, and the waiter promises to return with one for her along with Chouji's various treats.

"So," Temari says at last, rather pointedly addressing Sasuke even though her voice remains studiously bland. "Bad weekend?"

When Sasuke tilts her head, abandoning her cigarette on the saucer turned ashtray, Naruto realises she must have hit her quite harder than she thought. Rather, it felt like slugging her with all her strength, but she obviously can't have done that, so she's thought of it as more of a slap. Now she stares, briefly, at the small greenish knuckle-print on Sasuke's cheekbone.

Stubbing out the cigarette, Sasuke replies, "In a manner of speaking."

She wouldn't be Sasuke if she'd just say, Sort of.

"Did Itachi neglect his medication again?" Temari is using the tone Mum does sometimes, her voice bland because otherwise it would be sharp.

"No," says Sasuke. "For the last time, he's not Gaara, he doesn't turn into an evil psycho without the pills."

"We know that," Shikamaru interjects, before Naruto can tell Sasuke in no uncertain terms that Gaara is neither evil nor psychotic. She'd assumed his sister would. "I think what Temari is trying to get at is, we thought your father was out of town."

"He is."

Clearly Sasuke is not the only one who considers the proletariat to be objects, deaf as well as dumb.

_It doesn't matter what you know, you're nothing._

"Then what?" Temari demands, her frown lines like trenches. Evidently pretty mini-adults have snapping points too. Naruto's never doubted it, but the proof is reassuring. "You can't tell me your mother would."

"My mother," Sasuke says, her fingers white around the cigarette grounded viciously into the saucer, "is not coordinated enough to hit me even if she'd dared to try."

The balancing act is coming to a close, and Naruto doesn't want it to anymore, not like this. Sasuke snapping looks to be a much less dignified affair than Temari doing it.

Her gaze stumbles over, sticks on, the edge of a scar peeking over Sasuke's neckline, and all of a sudden Gaara's tattoo seems not only melodramatic but moreover rather cheap.

Which isn't fair, at all. However, at the moment Naruto is a good deal more concerned with the unfairness inherent in keeping her mouth shut. Jesus.

She is about to confess all, but the words are overrun by a high-pitched whine provoked by her knee imploding. Complicated home-life notwithstanding, even though it sounds like the sort that would be called fucked-up and abusive if it happened to somebody in Naruto's income bracket, Sasuke can still kick like a bitch.

Like a bull, even.

Naruto remembers with astonishing clarity why she hit her in the first place. It's just it's the clarity of looking at a photograph – you can see all the details, and the colours are still vivid as in life, but it's separate from you and how you see it has been changed, the time between the photo being taken and you looking at it has twisted it somehow.

Provided she could smack Sasuke within ten minutes of finding out she had self-harm issues and had lost her boyfriend, it makes sense that she'd still do it, but everything feels different.

The waiter returns, startling her into banging her already abused knee into the table, and it's a testament to the character building proprieties of being told to shut up or else for most of her academic life that Naruto manages to grunt out "thank you" instead of "son of a bitch".

Chouji throws himself at his sweets with blissful abandon, and Naruto picks up her cinnamon bun. Shikamaru's smooching off Temari's tea, which Naruto thinks confirms his boyfriend status; Sasuke plays idly with the cigarette butts, and her hands are still the sexiest Naruto's ever encountered, and once they too had a boyfriend's to link with.

A year ago, give or take. It makes sense for Sasuke to have a boyfriend, she's too pretty and popular and self-conscious for the lack of one to be accidental.

"Um," Chouji says, having meticulously cleaned his platters. "Are you going to finish that?"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah." She takes a large bite of the bun, which really is extremely tasty.

"Oh. Because you seemed more interested in – I mean, are you…?"

"Am I what?"

Temari looks extraordinarily amused. "I believe he's trying to ask if you're hitting on Sasuke."

Choking, Naruto realises that this is her cue to swallow before talking, or more specifically before listening, in the future.

How Sasuke has managed to smoke herself into a state of nirvana on unaltered tobacco Naruto will never know, but she's smirking as she looks first at Temari, then at Naruto, and a long sultry look it is, before finally she returns her attention to Temari, sharing the sort-of-smile.

Naruto's never seen her exactly grin before, in between the smirks and smiles and sneers. She's also never previously known Sasuke to check her out, particularly not like this, so blatantly it seemed like it was in jest but so brazenly it felt almost real. The hot line of Sasuke's gaze draws goose-bumps from her feet to the top of her head, the tension lying like a diadem over it even after Sasuke's turned away.

"Well," says Shikamaru, philosophically scooping sugar into Temari's co-opted tea. "Why not? The two of you," and he nods at Temari and Sasuke, "were quite hot together."

Naruto splutters water all over the table.

Temari looks at her rather like you'd look at a cockroach engaging in a piece of performance art on your table.

"Yeah," Chouji fills in with an expansive grin, recovering from his grief over the cinnamon bun that got away. "You see, there was this huge party, right after Gaara – well, last year."

"Right after Gaara'd got properly medicated," Shikamaru fills in, so Zen he'd be overly serene in a Buddhist monastery.

"Right," Chouji continues, "and there was this game of spin the bottle, and everybody was, nobody was really sober."

In the sudden embarrassed silence everyone looks desperately uncomfortable. It's kind of interesting how utterly different yet perfectly recognisable the same emotion looks on the varied faces.

It's kind of even more interesting how everybody's so conscientiously not looking at Sasuke that outright staring appears polite.

"Why yes, we are all aware my judgement was somewhat less than pristine that evening. Moving on."

For a moment nobody does, then Naruto blurts, "So is Gaara your twin brother? Because you're the same age, right?" and the tension drains so abruptly she's left bobbing. It's a heady sensation.

"No," Temari replies, her hands quite calm around her tea cup, which she holds the same way Naruto cups her hot chocolate on lonely, desperate winter evenings. "We're not twins. We have different mothers."

"Oh?"

"Well, yes. Kankurou and I are full siblings, Gaara's a bit of an offshoot."

Naruto takes it Kankurou and Temari are Daddy Suna's kids with his wife, since _a bit of an offshoot_ is pretty plainly highbrow slang for _the mistress' bastard offspring_.

Focusing on that, or trying to, doesn't change the fact that she can't seem to stop compulsively imagining Sasuke kissing, those perfect hands knotted in another girl's blond hair. Which she should stop, if nothing else then because there's a line between appreciative curiosity and raw sexual fantasy, one that it would be damn skeezy to cross when it comes to people you actually know.

Not unusually, her staring has apparently been less inconspicuous than it ought to, which is embarrassing only, Naruto tells herself, only because after years of daydreaming through classes she should've achieved a modicum of discretion by now.

"Why so shocked?" Sasuke inquires, snakelike again; a cold, lazy predator without the forthright approach of its mammal counterparts. Naruto has never been especially fond of snakes, watched the nature programs featuring them with a repulsed sort of fascination. "After all this should be good news for you – girl on girl is hot enough even you might get some."

If Sasuke thinks she can be coarse to someone who grew up considering the backstreets her safe haven, she has another thing coming. At least Naruto wasn't the only one who experienced difficulty concentrating on the intricacies of the Suna family structure.

"Nah," she says. "I'm gonna be a rock star. I'll have a billion groupies lusting after me."

Sasuke quirks an eyebrow, almost friendly as she liberates a new cigarette from her pocket and sticks it between lips Naruto has no business looking at. "Do you even play an instrument?"

"I do great air guitar."

At this point the gathering is broken up by the bus schedule, which dictates Chouji's hasty departure.

"Er, right," Naruto remembers when Shikamaru hands Sasuke the bills Chouji left, telling her with a shrug, _your turn I think, take it as an incentive to actually order something next time_. "How much do I owe?"

Sasuke gets to her feet in a movement like a shrug, the way snakes would stand if they could. "Don't bother."

"But Chouji paid," Naruto says, mostly to Shikamaru since Sasuke has disappeared.

"Chouji also ate for about thirty quid," Shikamaru says. "Although I have the distinct impression he only left us twenty."

"Oh."

Temari smiles, her hip leaning comfortably against Shikamaru's shoulder. "The draw-backs of dating the lower classes. And, Naruto – Kankurou's birthday is coming up. As Gaara's friend, of course you're invited to the party."

"I am? I mean, thanks! That's – awesome."

"I should certainly hope so," Temari says. "Come on, Sasuke's leaving."

Outside the sun has sunk, coating everything with a film of thick orange-tinted gold. Admittedly this marks no great change for what vegetation has survived, as it has done so at the cost of any green or luscious qualities it may once have possessed.

"Well, we're off this way," Temari says, her hand around Shikamaru's wrist in a grip vaguely reminiscent of Kiba fisting Akamaru's leash. To be fair, Naruto reckons there's no other viable option for holding hands with such an enormous slow-poke; if you're not ready to drag, he's not ready to walk.

"Bye," she says, and then she's alone with Sasuke, who hasn't left but is reclining on the stone ledge bordering the wizened flower bed just outside the café. Naruto looks at her, and she's the same as she's always been. Smug, infuriating, selfish, bitchy. "I'm really sorry. I mean, I wasn't before, really, but now – I'm, I'm sorry."

A one-shouldered shrug later, Sasuke consults her watch and stands. "I bruise easily."

"What? So?"

"So I think I got you rather worse."

"It doesn't _matter_," Naruto insists, fisting her hands against the itch for violence, for contact, connection. "Violence is an unacceptable response."

For possibly the first time she really agrees with the counsellors she's parroting.

"For the record, I disagree."

"Yeah, well, you disagree about almost everything. It just means you're wrong."

Sasuke smirks faintly, as though contemplating whether to reward a promising attempt with a reply.

Naruto hurries to continue, "You do martial arts, right?"

"I did."

"Why d'you quit? Failed to meet the weight requirements?" It's too bad she only bites her tongue after the quip is out. Mouth full of blood, she couldn't honestly say if it was a challenge or a joke or the verbal equivalent of a punch.

"Actually I kicked someone too hard."

"Yeah, that's happened to me too. So, I thought, I practice, and Dad too actually, maybe we could…?"

"Why not? All right. Your place?"

"Sure. I mean, it's just a couple of mats and stuff in the basement, but yeah." There's not enough air, the world gone strange and giddy, but she's grinning, a bit wildly.

"Wednesday, then? Good. But, Naruto," and she's in half-profile, her face a new take on a very old picture; the lines are beauty of the timeless kind, how Mary and Juliet and Beatrice have always been depicted, but the abstract, rather garish shadow-play overlying it is modernistic, "you're not my friend."

"I don't want to be your friend," Naruto tells her, and wonders if she's lying.

Glancing up from her preoccupation with yet another cigarette, Sasuke says, "With that sterling attitude, no wonder you're so popular."

"Because victim blaming is such an attractive quality in a person." It's never worked like that, never been about the victim, not really, however for the first time she's uncertain whether Sasuke understands this. But no matter how protected she is personally, surely Sasuke's had plenty of exposure to the fact that popular people tend to have thoroughly unpleasant attitudes?

"I've no interest in being attractive to you."

Naruto smiles, warm, at least partly because Sasuke could have but did not say, _Indeed, you appear to find it madly attractive_.

And Naruto never gets the last word, but getting the last word doesn't mean you're right, so she guesses she's all right with that.

xxxxx

Kiba and Shino work through their honeymoon phase like they did the fight before it, settling back into the steady everyday comfort of a lifelong relationship; the ground has shifted, but Naruto discovers the earthquake did not swallow her house after all.

She likes Hinata better, but maybe Shino isn't so bad.

Also, Haku is freaking lovely.

All of which means Naruto's leaving the school premises in a rather up-beat mood, contentment pulsing through her like the beat of a kum ba ya ya drum.

Outside the gates fencing off the Sannin Academy property, apparently waiting for her, is the boy from the bullying incident.

Taking out his earphones and adjusting his cap with a toothy grin too young to be sleazy but too sleazy to be truly young, he is the image of a tweener skater boy. He is also swaggering up to her, hiking his trousers up every other step to keep them from exposing more than the topmost half of his underwear, the stream of students parting around him.

"Yo," he says. "I'm Konohamaru. Er." He pulls his jeans up again, seeming to gain strength from the ritualistic motion. "You were pretty cool the other day, I guess. And, well, you're not really my type or anything, but you're not all bad." His lingering gaze reminds Naruto that although her upper body is flat, she has hips like a work mare. "So I thought we could, like, go out."

Naruto swallows a raw, startled laugh.

From up on the first rung on the social ladder, looking down on everything she used to be, before people, before Sasuke, looked back at her – it's a sickening thought, as though reality has twisted into something nasty and distorted, but for an instant she can understand, sort of, why people like Sasuke are able to think: people are bullied for a reason.

It'd make sense, of a sick kind, if they didn't see the difference between being a freak and being a jerk.

The former can't be helped, the latter very much can.

She wants nothing so much as kicking the entire stupid fucking social ladder into pieces. They could make a nice warm communal camp fire with the pieces, afterwards.

If Konohamaru had been a little older, she'd have told him where to stick it; if he'd been a little less removed from childhood, she might've ruffled his hair.

She says, "Nah. I find the whole white knight/damsel formerly in distress relationship dynamic pretty unhealthy."

xxxxx

"Well?" Sasuke demands.

Wrestling her backpack from the steadily shrinking locker, Naruto reflects that it might have been a question, might even have been a passably polite inquiry, but in Sasuke's mouth of course it's a demand.

She has the looks for a light voice, but it's shockingly rusty, like a much older woman's throaty tones. Perhaps it's because of the smoking, but if cigarettes gave you that particular voice everyone would smoke.

Except Naruto, of course.

It's odd, but she's patently sure Sasuke did not speak like this a year ago – there wouldn't have been this rawness to her superciliousness, and definitely no curses.

"Hold your horses, Uchiha," she mutters, the backpack tumbling free and hoisted over her shoulder in victory. "Right, c'mon."

They hurry across the lawn, thankfully too fast for much conversation, and make it to the bus just before it leaves.

When Naruto was small and had trouble picking up new vocabulary, Mum used to play the dictionary game with her: they'd decide on any random object and come up with as many words as they could for which the item could work as a definition.

Perched beside her on the ratty seat of a public transportation vehicle, Sasuke is a stunning illustration of incongruity. A case could be made for _pearls before swine_, and possibly _diamond in the rough_, if you put a more literal spin on it.

The way she fusses with her dress, fastidious but helpless in the face of dirt as only someone raised around a cleaning staff can be, makes Naruto snicker. "Come on," she says, fingers closing around Sasuke's wrist to pull her down to sit properly. "I'm sure they've cleaned it since the vomiting incident."

Sasuke glares at her in outrage and pulls her arm free, but sits without comment.

Gazing at her sideways, one eye out the window to keep the motion sickness at bay, Naruto remarks, "You look like a huffy China doll. Well, except they'd never paint such a mean face on one."

Carriage stiff and every fold of the blue dress creased perfectly, Sasuke's mouth thins in displeasure, before curving at the corner. "Why yes, I am well aware I am an art-piece of priceless and transcendent beauty, tragically caught in a frame of filth."

"Yeah, right," Naruto snorts. She'd have said vulnerable, where Sasuke put transcendent, but she doesn't fancy another real fight. "More like a pretentious term project at art school."

"Because you're such an expert on the finer things in life."

"Yeah," Naruto says, stretching luxuriously all over the seat, en elbow smearing sweaty grease over the window. "I am."

"You're an – adequate diversion." She pauses, the skirt rustling as she shifts her legs. "I guess what I said, before. That it's still true."

_I could tell you anything, it doesn't matter what you know because it doesn't matter what you think._

Right this second, it doesn't so much matter why exactly Sasuke can tell her anything, because Sasuke is an idiot anyway.

The next one it does.

Sasuke's face is too much, her body, her hands; Naruto focuses on the ring circling her left thumb, loosely enough it bumps into the knuckle. She'd thought it was simple, but of course she should have known better than to assume Sasuke would wear unrefined jewellery. Engraved in the silver is an abstract pattern filled with translucent glitter that Naruto assumes is diamonds. Regardless of its owner, it's very beautiful.

"You're an idiot," she says, looking up into Sasuke's face in surprise when her own voice comes out thick. "But, Temari was still right. I really – I want to fuck you, you know that, right?"

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

I originally created this account to post _And After_ because I'd lost access to my original one, elveljung. Having recently recovered it, I'll repost and keep updating _And After _there, as soon as school calms down enough to permit one more round of editing. Possibly I will also update the name, since _And After_ is very much a working title I settled on in desperation, but the summary will (I hope!) clarify any ambiguities. Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading, and especially to those of you who have taken the time to leave lovely feedback – I hope you'll keep reading over at the elveljung account, where the fic should be up soonish.


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